ASUS MARS GTX 760 4 GB Review

Name: ASUS MARS GTX 760 4 GB
Brand: ASUS

W1zzard

on Dec 13th, 2013,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: ASUS

(21 Comments) »

Introduction

The GeForce GTX 760 has been on the market for a while and has established itself as a solid upper- midrange graphics card. The card is based on the same 28 nm GK104 silicon as the GeForce GTX 680, but only features six of the chip's eight streaming multiprocessors, which translates into a configuration with 1,152 CUDA cores and 96 texture memory units (TMUs). Unlike the GTX 660 Ti, NVIDIA left the memory and raster operations subsystems untouched, giving the chip a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface and 32 ROPs.

The chip features NVIDA's new GPU Boost 2.0 technology, which takes temperature, power, and load into account. Opportunities for the GPU to run boost frequencies at load are greater if the GPU is cool (under the 80°C mark) and therein lies the incentive to opt for custom-design graphics cards with competent cooling solutions. The memory is clocked at 6 Gbps, which yields a decent memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s, a 33 percent increase over the GTX 660 Ti and GTX 660.

ASUS carved a completely new, unique product out of this successful GTX 760 foundation: the ROG MARS GTX 760. It is based on two GTX 760 GPUs on one graphics card running in SLI, connected through a PLX PEX8747 PCI-Express gen 3.0 bridge chip on the card. All major specs, like shaders, memory size, bus width, etc., have effectively been doubled due to the use of two graphics processors.

The card is priced at a seemingly steep $630, which is significantly more expensive than buying two separate GTX 760 cards for $470. The ASUS MARS GTX 760 is only $70 cheaper than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 780 Ti flagship.

ASUS GTX 760 MARS Market Segment Analysis
	GeForce GTX 770	HD 7970 GHz Ed.	GeForce GTX 680	GeForce GTX 780	Radeon R9 290	Radeon R9 290X	Radeon HD 7990	GeForce GTX Titan	ASUS MARS GTX 760	GeForce GTX 780 Ti	GeForce GTX 690
Shader Units	1536	2048	1536	2304	2560	2816	2x 2048	2688	2x 1152	2880	2x 1536
ROPs	32	32	32	48	64	64	2x 32	48	2x 32	48	2x 32
Graphics Processor	GK104	Tahiti	GK104	GK110	Hawaii	Hawaii	2x Tahiti	GK110	2x GK104	GK110	2x GK104
Transistors	3500M	4310M	3500M	7100M	6200M	6200M	2x 4310M	7100M	2x 3500M	7100M	2x 3500M
Memory Size	2048 MB	3072 MB	2048 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	2x 3072 MB	6144 MB	2x 2048 MB	3072 MB	2x 2048 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	384 bit	256 bit	384 bit	512 bit	512 bit	2x 384 bit	384 bit	2x 256 bit	384 bit	2x 256 bit
Core Clock	1046 MHz+	1050 MHz	1006 MHz+	863 MHz+	947 MHz	1000 MHz	1000 MHz	837 MHz+	1006 MHz+	876 MHz+	915 MHz+
Memory Clock	1753 MHz	1500 MHz	1502 MHz	1502 MHz	1250 MHz	1250 MHz	1500 MHz	1502 MHz	1502 MHz	1750 MHz	1502 MHz
Price	$330	$380	$390	$500	$400	$550	$770	$1000	$630	$700	$1000

Packaging

You will receive:

Graphics card
Driver CD + documentation
PCI-Express power cable
ASUS ROG magnetic case badge
DVI to D-Sub adapter

The Card

ASUS chose to brand their MARS GTX 760 with the ROG colors, which looks very good; I also like how its surfaces are a bit more complex now, instead of a plain, singlular color without any detail. The black sections of its cooler have a rubbery surface effect to it, giving it a nice feel. Dimensions of the card are 28 x 12 cm.

Installation requires two slots in your system.

Display connectivity options include three DVI ports and one mini-DisplayPort. You may use all outputs at the same time, so triple-monitor surround gaming is possible with one card.

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.

A single SLI connector allows you to combine the MARS with another GTX 760 for a triple-SLI configuration. Quad-SLI (with another MARS 760) is not supported by the NVIDIA driver, although we haven't tested this.